Seems to me there should be a place for writing a Progressive Web App with server-side rendering, and have the server side rendering be written in Java (or C# or any other server side language). It would need boilerplate HTML and JS to make the connection, and then use the same protocols to update the web page.
You'd still need to grapple with the fact that it's going to ultimately render the structure into the DOM (which is basically the same structure as HTML) and use CSS to style it, but you could at least use native language features to support it. You just can't avoid the fact that any web browser app has to think like a web browser. HTML and CSS aren't really languages; they're data structures that just happen to have a DSL for composing them.
I mean, if you wanted it to REALLY be Java you could use Java Web Start (no longer supported, but descendants of it exist). But then you're not really writing for the web; you're writing Java desktop apps that just happen to use a browser for delivery.
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Seems to me there should be a place for writing a Progressive Web App with server-side rendering, and have the server side rendering be written in Java (or C# or any other server side language). It would need boilerplate HTML and JS to make the connection, and then use the same protocols to update the web page.
You'd still need to grapple with the fact that it's going to ultimately render the structure into the DOM (which is basically the same structure as HTML) and use CSS to style it, but you could at least use native language features to support it. You just can't avoid the fact that any web browser app has to think like a web browser. HTML and CSS aren't really languages; they're data structures that just happen to have a DSL for composing them.
I mean, if you wanted it to REALLY be Java you could use Java Web Start (no longer supported, but descendants of it exist). But then you're not really writing for the web; you're writing Java desktop apps that just happen to use a browser for delivery.